


The End

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Gen, Not A Happy Ending, Sadstuck, no seriously it's actually pretty sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:15:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You get so tired of the fight, and you just want it to be over, but then you're there, at the end of the road, and you realize that peace isn't really peaceful and you should never have counted on a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End

It was just a _game_.

It was just a _game_ , you were going to play a _game_ with your friends, you were going to smile and laugh and enjoy yourself with something that didn’t have anything to do with learning and passive aggression and your mother and her alcohol, your brilliant sweet mad scientist lush of a mother who was--

You _thought_ it was just a _game._

Now you’re staring out over the ruins of Skaia, the fires dying down now that they’ve run out of things to burn-- there’s no trees left, now, just blood and ash and the remains of a world, the destroyed castles and towers and the bodies strewn across the ground, so many of them you think you could walk all the way around the planet without once setting foot on solid ground. You could just walk all the way around on the corpses.

Technically, you’ve won the fight. Not the game-- you can’t win the game, can’t create a new universe. What’s left now is all you have, and all you will ever have. But Lord English is dead, and Jack Noir, Bec Noir-- he who killed your mother, John’s father, Dave’s brother, he is dead too, although--

But that’s neither here nor there.

They are not the only ones who died.

Prospit, Derse-- all the incarnations of them you have known, they are all ruined, thoroughly destroyed, the pieces a part of the rubble around you, the carapacians who inhabited them edging up the body count.

The carapacians who fought on the battlefield are long gone, slaughtered before the final battle even began.

The white Bec Noir, the _good_ Bec Noir although now you could argue that-- regardless of what you could argue, she, too, is fallen, snow-white wings stained pink with her own blood.

How many worlds, at least, fell to the reckonings? Alternia and Earth, each twice over, survived only by small bands of baffled teenagers who were completely unprepared to throw away everything, fighting for their lives and their friends lives and their god damned _universes_.

Well.

When you say they were survived by you mean--

Initially, those who _entered_ the game--

Which is to say that--

The people who stand with you in one of the many shallow lakes of blood are your friends, but they are not all of your friends, and they do not have the comfort of all of _their_ friends, either.

The trolls’ beta session-- well, they were _already_ dead, really, it’s not-- it’s not _that_ heartbreaking, they were _already dead_ , what can you even do.

(They are all dead.)

Earth’s alpha session, your scratched session, produced two survivors-- Jane Crocker, who is... _not_ John’s nanna, and your brother-father-figure, Dirk Strider, and they stand quietly to the side, Jane’s face buried in Dirk’s shoulder with their arms wound tightly around each other. Dirk’s face is similarly buried in Jane’s hair, and in the silence you can hear him murmuring to her, voice hitching every time her silent sobs get particularly vicious. Dirk, you know, grew up alone, mostly, raised himself. Alone in the future with the weight of the world on his shoulders, his only three friends oceans and hundreds of years away from him, just text on a screen. Now one of them stands in front of him, in his arms, but the other two ( _and_ she’s _there, but you cannot look, refuse to look, refuse to even picture it in your mind’s eye because they’re so_ similar _but they’re not the same, they’re not, except that now they’re both d--_ ) lie dead at their feet, their best friends and beloveds slain, and there is no joy to finally being in each other’s company without pressing concerns.

The alpha session of trolls, your trolls-- most of them were already dead by the time you got here, but you had four of them, and one of them was Kanaya, your Kanaya, your beautiful fashionable vampiric Kanaya, and now your arms are painted jade green all the way up to your elbows. It drips off your fingertips and is splotched on the knees of your pants and is probably smudged on your face, too. Jade is splattered with purple and red, but the red is staining her hands as she presses into it.

“Jade,” Karkat says, and you’re used to the shouting and the insults and the rambling, but this-- his voice is tired, so tired, so exhausted, _bone-weary,_ and you don’t know if you can handle it. “Jade, it’s okay.”

“Shut up,” Jade tells him, but her voice is shrill and choked. “Shut up, Karkat, shut up, shut up, you’re going to be fine.”

He smiles up at her, or tries to, at the very least. “Hey, John. John. _Hey_. Look at me, dumbass.”

“I’m looking,” John whispers. He threads his fingers through Karkat’s. “I’m right here, Karkat, dude, you’re gonna be fine, we can-- we can get you through this--”

“Nah,” Karkat murmurs, reaching up, blindly, to press a hand against John’s cheek. You feel a little sick when you realize it hardly makes a difference, the new blood, because John is already _covered_ in blood, cherry red and copper-scented and _oh god_. “Barely conscious, can’t see straight. Don’t think I’m gonna make it.”

“Karkat, no,” John whimpers.

“Sorry. Fuck. Really sorry. I don’t want to.”

“Then-- then don’t, come on, please, hold on, for me, for-- for Terezi, can you just hold on for Terezi, just until we--”

“John,” Karkat sighs. “I’m so sorry. S-- sorry. Hey, I’ll... wherever the hell I end up. I’ll. I’ll say hi to Strider for you. And-- Lalonde, Rose, Rose. I’ll tell Kan off for you. For leaving you behind.”

“Karkat,” you say. Your voice is strangled.

“Come on, Seer,” he rasps, tries to laugh, coughs on it, turns his head to spit out the blood that comes up. “You’re-- _hngh_. You’re supposed to be the rational one. You know... you know it can’t be helped.”

“Please, no,” Jade cries, her head bent over him, the ends of her hair trailing in the puddle of his own blood that he’s lying in. “No, no, Karkat, please, no, please no, Jane can fix you, I’m sure she can, we’ll try again.”

“Jane’s exhausted,” he slurs. “You all are. Exhausted. Find a good ruined castle and take a nap, once I’m-- done.”

“I can try again,” Jane whispers, timidly, lifting her head from Dirk’s shoulder just barely enough to be heard. “I’m not that tired and I’d rather-- if I passed out saving you, that’d be okay, that’d be fair, I wouldn’t mind.”

Dirk’s embrace tightens around her, protectively, and you can see the twist of guilt on his face afterwards as he loosens it again; he does not want to watch his last friend hurt herself, not after all this, but there is a life on the line, one last life you might be able to save, and if there’s a _chance_...

“Didn’t do much good the first time around, did it,” Karkat laughs, chokes out blood again. “When you weren’t tired too. It’s... okay. Really. I don’t... mind. At least I... got to see... it through. Got to see it through.”

“Karkat,” John says, voice rising in panic. “Don’t you dare.”

Karkat’s hand falls, limp, from his face.

“Karkat!” Jade screams.

“Karkat,” you choke.

“No,” John squeaks.

“Sorry,” Karkat mumbles.

“No, no, no, no, no--” John fumbles with the hand in his grasp, presses his fingers to a bloody wrist to check the pulse, jerks to feel the pulse at his neck, and you can only watch, frozen, as he clamps his fingers on Karkat’s nose, tilts his head back, and breathes into him, over and over and over and over and over again, for what feels like hours, for what might actually _be_ hours.

Jade cries and cries and cries and cries, and Jane starts up again, face pressed once again into Dirk’s collar. Dirk’s eyes are squeezed shut ( _his glasses are long gone, shattered in the fight_ ) and he’s trembling, shaking so hard it’s a wonder he can stand. Finally, you manage to take one step forward, then another, then another, until you’re kneeling next to John in the blood, and you gently pry him away from-- from Karkat’s body.

“No!” John shouts, startling you all, drawing another scream from Jade. He thrashes and kicks and punches as you haul him back. “No, I can’t, I have to save him, I _can_ save him, I can--”

“John,” you say. “He’s dead.”

All the fight goes out of him, and he slumps against you. “But he can’t be dead,” he says, voice very, very small.

“I’m sorry,” you say, and it makes you want to throw up and you wonder if you will ever be able to apologize to anyone ever again without thinking of Karkat’s dying words.

“He can’t be dead,” John repeats, childishly. “He can’t be dead because-- because Dave is dead too, and they can’t both be dead, Rose, what am I supposed to do if they’re both dead, oh my God, _Dave’s dead,_ he’s _dead_ , oh my GOD--”

And then _he_ begins to cry, and you look at Dirk and Dirk looks at you, and you are so, so tired. Jane, of the other three, is the least hysteric, or at least the most steady on her feet, so she drags herself away from Dirk to let him scoop up Jade, and helps you support John as you begin to step over blood and rubble in search of a place to spend the night. You do not think any further ahead, even though you are a Seer, because you cannot bear to think any farther ahead. What could possibly be left for you? It is only the five of you, alone in the universe, in the multiverse, surrounded by death and destruction, with nothing to do and no place to go and no one to live for.

Technically, you won.

It wasn’t worth it.


End file.
